Commerce Media: New growth opportunities in e-commerce?

Commerce media as the key to new marketing potential

Commerce Media is becoming increasingly relevant as a data-driven advertising strategy. The concept breaks with traditional approaches to how advertisers address and monetize the customer journey in e-commerce.

Commerce media links commerce data and intelligence. The discipline uses first-party data from platforms and online shops to place advertising in a targeted manner throughout the entire customer journey. This enables these companies to become independent advertising media themselves, while also allowing them to address customers in a targeted manner at all touchpoints of the customer journey. This form of targeting increases conversion rates and opens new potential and growth opportunities for marketers and publishers.

Commerce Media dissolves advertising silos

Retail media – one of the top topics at DMEXCO in recent years – is a sub-segment of commerce media. Retail media focuses on advertising in the traditional retail environment. This primarily includes transactions involving physical goods and merchandise.

Commerce Media significantly expands this approach: The concept integrates advertising on all commercial platforms where transactions are processed, as well as advertising solutions that are controlled based on the commerce data collected there. This includes platforms for all types of goods and services, as well as providers of loyalty programs. It makes no difference whether the platforms are providers of physical, digital, or hybrid B2C or B2B business models.

Commerce media thus opens new touchpoints for advertisers. Thanks to the broad spectrum of commercial transactions, commerce media provides them with insights into consumer behavior.

360-degree view of customer interactions

Commerce media seamlessly connects advertising messages across all customer touchpoints. Like retail media, commerce media also leverages the synergy between offline and online data.

In practice, this can look like this: An automobile manufacturer links digital touchpoints, such as website activity, with offline interactions at the dealership. A customer who takes a test drive receives an offer and is then targeted online with personalized digital ads.

The combination of data points gives advertisers a holistic view of all customer interactions. This creates a detailed foundation of behavioral and transaction patterns and facilitates personalized, dynamic marketing strategies. This results in target group-specific, highly relevant, and effective customer communications. Commerce media also offers a level of efficiency that leads to a higher return on investment (ROI) for advertisers in the long term.

Countering Challenges

Data protection regulations are becoming increasingly strict. In addition, the use of third-party cookies has been declining steadily for several years. Advertisers therefore need agile solutions to use customer data more efficiently. Commerce media can serve as a lever to respond to current challenges.

Commerce media pursues a first-party data approach. This data is collected directly from the platforms on their own channels. It is subject to the company’s full control. This allows advertisers to target their audiences without relying on external tracking methods. Artificial intelligence helps to efficiently evaluate the collected data and automatically optimize campaigns – without passing on personal data to third parties.

Those who rely on data-driven, customer-centric approaches in the future will not only increase marketing efficiency but also build long-term customer relationships.

Enabling marketing architectures

With advancing digitalization and the widespread use of artificial intelligence, commerce media will become even more powerful. Machine learning and predictive analytics will be able to predict purchasing decisions much more accurately in the future. Companies will use this to proactively design their marketing campaigns. Continuously growing data pools and improved analysis tools will enable advertisers to run finely tuned and responsive campaigns. Commerce media thus secures advertisers’ interpretive authority over the customer journey of tomorrow.